When our moms didn't want to hang out but wanted to let us play, they adopted a method called "meeting halfway," and they would drive us fifteen minutes to meet in a Ream's parking lot that was essentially halfway between our two houses. We would switch kids, sometimes half of us would stay with my mom, sometimes half of us would stay with my aunt Cheeryl, and sometimes all of us would stay in one place at once.
If we stayed at Cheeryl's, night games or a trip to the movie theatre were virtual guarantees. If we stayed at my house, two hours of swimming at Jerry's Swim School, snow cones, and a dollar movie were expected. My mom got tired of paying for our snow cones or dollar movies, I think, and eventually told us we had to come up with the money on our own. We searched in places where money tends to fall out of pockets- under the couch cushions, under the washer and dryer, under beds, in cracks and corners. Quarters were the jackpot, but we would save the dimes and nickels just in case.
When we couldn't find enough money (which was the majority of the time), we would hang out at the house, jump on the neighbor's trampoline, have a water fight, ride bikes, color, make plays and skits or do makeovers. One Halloween we made a haunted house in my unfinished basement, but that one is a whole different hilarious story. I look back at the things we did as kids and am amazed at the creative ways we found to entertain ourselves. Those were the funnest times of my childhood. We always had a watermelon at our house in the summer, and my mom made us sit outside to eat it so we could spit the seeds in the grass. One year (this is no lie) a watermelon grew in front of our house from one of the seeds someone spit out there.
Each cousin had someone from the other family to play with. Kateka and I hung out. Our older sisters Cassie and Makayla hung out with each other. Our brothers Joseph and Travis hung out with each other, and our little sisters Tazia and Megan hung out (with Joseph sometimes, as he was closer in age to them than to Travis). Cassie and Makayla were older and cooler, and we were always trying to find ways to hang out with them. They were always trying to find ways to avoid us. As Kateka and I got older, we found the same thing happening to us. Tazia and Megan tried to follow us around, and we invented ingenious ways of getting rid of them. My favorites that I can remember were the Doll-Kick, and the Bad Guy.
Tazia owned a doll named "Incense." This doll was extremely precious to her, and was considered an actual human baby. She was hesitant to let anyone hold Incense unless Incense was in "doll mode." You put the doll behind your back, brought her back around, and said, "Tada, she's not a baby right now, she's just a doll." A doll can be mistreated you see, but a human can't. Incense had the ability to change from human to doll anytime, and the occasional rough grip or drop of the doll could be justified. "Oops. When Incense fell off the bed just then, she was a doll, not a baby."
On one occasion, Tazia and Megan kept following us so Kateka came up with an brilliant idea to get rid of them for a while. "Tazia, can Sarah and I babysit Incense?" Tazia reluctantly agreed and gave us Incense. We went to Kateka's room where we hid Incense under Kateka's bed. Kateka folded Incense's blanket carefully in a bundle to look as if Incense was still wrapped up in it, and we went back to Tazia's room. Kateka coddled the blanket and cooed at it. When Tazia came forward to take the doll back, Kateka drop-kicked the bundle clear across the room, and it hit the ceiling on its journey. I've never heard such screams like the ones that came from Tazia. I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure Kateka may have ran over and stomped on the "baby" a few times for good measure. Our plan to get them to leave us alone worked, until our parents came in and we got in trouble for the stunt.
Another trick we tried to get rid of them was the invention of a bad guy. Kateka scratched my back a few times until there were red marks and we put water on my cheeks for the effect of tears. I ran around to Tazia and Megan and acted upset and perturbed. "You guys, this guy just came by and scratched my back up really hard. Look!" I lifted my shirt up and heard them gasp. "You have to go find him," Kateka told the kids. "He's wearing, uh, a black hat and black clothes. Go look around the neighborhood. Look EVERYWHERE! We saw him run off that way. Go there first." And of course, while they were gone, we played.
When Kateka and I wanted to meet somewhere and play alone, we found that we couldn't simply say "Meet me at the school" because the kids would hear us and rush to the school to join in. So we started spelling our words. "Meet me at the s-c-h-o-o-l." This worked a few times and this method eventually evolved into where we were just laughing at our own cleverness, rather than actually meeting anywhere. "Meet me in the g-a-r-b-a-g-e c-a-n," one of us would say, and we would laugh hysterically. Tazia, who knew letters but not words, eventually got frustrated and started writing the letters down to ask her mom what they said when stringed together. Our joke ended when Cheeryl came in one day, "What's this about you guys meeting at the toilet? Why is Tazia writing the word 'potty' and asking me what it means?"
Now that we are older, we talk a lot more and play a lot less. Childhood is a completely different time than adolescence and adulthood, and now our arguments or connections are on a different level than they were when we were kids. The day before her wedding, Kateka asked my sister and I, "You aren't going to think differently of me now that I'll be married, will you?" I laughed. One doesn't lose the quality of youthfulness when one gains a husband, I hope.
“Children’s logic never asks to be proved (all conclusions are absolute).” -Maya Angelou
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